APPA-UX Design Case Study
B.Duncan, 2022
Our team at Click Creative were assigned a brief from APPA (Australasian Promotional Products Association) to develop a new website with a key focus on UX design to function alongside a reliable custom search platform for over 100,000 promotional items across Australasia. That’s where we came in - the Click Creative team provided a thorough list of deliverables with a primary focus on considered, functional UX design.
We set about giving APPA’s members and the public retail trade a platform with easily accessible information, directives and an interface for member job postings. The new website additions would also include a complete update of their website's branding by solidifying a contemporary scheme and providing complementary assets such as graphic and logo designs. With our ongoing management of their website hosting and digital marketing services, we wanted to share with you the importance of focalising UX in relation to web design.
About UX Design
UX (user experience) is essential to the experience and functionality of your web design and hasn’t halted in its rapid development within the digital marketing and tech space. UX is primarily defined by the extent to which a product can be used by to achieve specified goals with the most effective and satisfactory results in a pre-determined context of use. So it makes sense UX design is a core element of formulating concepts to optimise website growth. UX designers seek a positive emotional response from users to encourage an organic growth in return rates of users to your website.
A satisfactory outcome in the context of the experience your website provides, is now more than ever strongly bound to quality design elements with a sense of continuity. In a world of rapid technological advances robust functionality has geared towards being something of an expectation as opposed to a goal in the digital marketing industry. However this is far from inferring functionality is less relevant than aesthetic properties, but rather instead highlights the urgency to ensure your digital projects include a developed understanding and inclusion of UX design in all of its aspects. Now what’s important to understand is how and why all these individual properties of UX design increase the optimisation of your website and its user experience to grow your online platform.
How UX Design Can Improve Websites
Using the project our creative agency team at Click undertook with APPA as an example for the significance of UX, we can analyse their new website and define the positive impact of the updated UX design we implemented.
UX: Navigation
One of the most important factors of a positive user experience is the ability to clearly navigate your website so they can easily access information about your company and its services. This is where UX design comes in, ensuring you have buttons, blocks, text and images relevant to your business clearly visible. Such as making sure the menu button is included in the header of your page alongside any other significant links such as contact information, social symbols and/or logos.
You’ll notice APPA’s landing page has all of the above displayed clearly with any text, links or images having a strong contrast to the background colour whilst remaining on brand. All of this has made the user experience of navigating the APPA website very straightforward. Alongside this any blocks of imagery or indistinguishable symbols are labelled with titles and small descriptions to avoid any confusion for the user.
UX: Layout & Usability
Going back to basics, the layout of your page has to be several things including functional, useful and visually appealing. Our digital agency Melbourne team at Click chose to go with a clean design that stayed within the realm of the brand book colour palette. With one non distracting image as the background any text, images, blocks or widgets were placed in an organised fashion as to not overload the user with irrelevant clusters of content. It’s important not to clutter your page (particularly a landing page) as this will distract users and ultimately leave them with an unsatisfactory experience.
When referencing our work with APPA’s website any blocks containing imagery are cleanly displayed in a slideshow format when a user scrolls down, allowing them to pay full attention to the content these blocks display. Using a slideshow image style allows you to place important infographics / images on the page without taking up too much space and looking uncoordinated.
UX: Design Phase
Much like the other elements mentioned in this post, using UX design to achieve an aesthetically cohesive website that reflects your offline brand and doesn't appear outdated is important. The user experience is also reliant on the visual appeal of your website and they’re more likely to associate your website with your company if the two are harmonious. Ensuring things like complimentary colour schemes, fonts and imagery will give your page a sense of continuity. This will make the user experience more pleasurable and whilst your logo is already on your page, these attributes act similarly to that of a logo in that they distinguish your online presence as a company.
The UX Design Process
- empathise - user interviews & user research
- define - affinity mapping, personas & journey map
- ideate - user flow & information architecture
- design - low fidelity & high fidelity
- testing - usability testing & implementing feedback
Summary
There’s much more to learn about the benefits and how-to’s of implementing considered UX design into your website. From data analytics to the latest UX design trends and how these can help with your website SEO, it’s definitely something worth researching if you want your online business to succeed. We’ve only discussed some of the key factors of UX design as they pertain to the new APPA platform, but we would welcome the opportunity help your company explore how effectively implemented UX design can make the difference between an engaging journey for your customers - or a high bounce rate.
If you would like to learn more about user experience and how your website is faring right now, reach out to our Melbourne digital agency today!
